Beyond the High Blue Air. Lu Spinney
ways. To be suddenly thrown together again is an unnatural and painful accretion to an already painful situation. To any curious fellow guests on the first morning before Ron arrives we look like just another family on holiday, father, mother, and children sharing a hotel breakfast and later setting off together for a walk through the town; that our group is anomalous and our walk leads to an intensive care unit does not show. The strangeness, the strain for us all, is subsumed by the horror of the situation that has brought us together and when in the evening
the exuberant waiter in the Italian restaurant greets us as la bella famiglia inglese we don’t put him straight. I worry that it is especially difficult for the children, but now Ron has arrived and I take comfort from the civility of his and David’s relationship.
Ron and I take the airport bus into town and arrive at the hotel just in time to join the children and David setting off for the evening visit to the hospital. I can see the children’s relief at his arrival, the sharing of our predicament, his understanding without explanation. Once at the hospital Ron and I go first, walking down the dreaded corridor before I show him where to put on his plastic apron and gloves and then leading him through the eerie silence of the ward to Miles’s room. The machines are blinking, the ventilator soughs rhythmically, the nurse sits quietly in the corner reading. Miles lies alone on the high bed, so still he could be embalmed, a magnificent specimen of young manhood on display for whoever dares. Miles darling, Ron is here. Why do I say that? It’s not for me to be the interpreter, their relationship so strong my intervention is not required. I wonder if Ron would prefer to be on his own with him; it is difficult finding the words, easier to be alone, I think. I kiss them both and leave the room.
The uncomprehending, raw pain on Ron’s face when I return, this strong man rendered defenseless. I put my arms around him and we stand together in silence by Miles’s bed. The nurse turns away and inspects the medical chart hanging behind her.
Embracing Ron, I think, I want Miles to be in love again, make love again.
A week passes. Ron, Will, and David have gone back to London, to work, but they will continue to come and go. Still at university and now on their Easter vacation, Claudia and Marina have remained here with me. We visit Miles twice daily and are beginning to build our days into a routine. But this morning we must face our new reality afresh: the doctors are going to take Miles off his ventilator. They will “wean” him off it—that is the medical terminology.
The word wean is a singular euphemism here, though correct in its way. Miles has suffered a traumatic brain injury and, reduced to infantile dependency by the injury, he must now go through the hoops of developmental stages that are set out unconditionally in its wake. In the way that anxious new parents do, we follow the stages of his development intently and applaud each tiny sign of progress as though it were being achieved by a prodigy. The irony is not lost on us—Miles invariably succeeded, and when something wasn’t easy he set his cap at it with unstoppable determination. How the tables have turned; determination is no longer available to him. The stakes are different: if he succeeds today he will breathe on his own; or he won’t.
Our time with him is spent urgently, the three of us spurring him on in turn, goading him to success. Miles, we say, bending close to his ear, you have been breathing with the help of a ventilator for the past ten days since your accident. Today the doctors are going to take you off it—this is such a strong sign of your recovery. You are amazing, Miles. You are going to come back to us. You can do it, you can always do anything. You have so much life left to live, Miles, you must come back. You want to achieve great things and you will, you know that. You are so precious to us, we love you so very much . . . And so on, the urgency, once again, dissolving into an unabashed gush of feeling.
The afternoon shuts down; if I close my eyes I think I can feel the world rotating. When we finally arrive at the waiting room that evening and I pick up the phone to let the nurses’ station know we are there, time stops altogether for that moment. And then within seconds it seems Dr. Stizer is walking down the corridor towards us and he is smiling, a huge beaming smile under his great mustache. The girls and I are gripping each other’s hands so tightly mine hurts but yes, he unlocks the door and says to me, Your son is breathing on his own! He looks so genuinely happy and now with this kind foreign neurosurgeon in the little room we hug one another and hug him too and dance about like small children, crying the first and only tears of joy that we will know for Miles. He is alive! Breathing all by himself! The amazing boy! We can picture his recovery, we’re euphoric. It feels as though Miles has won the most difficult race ever run, against the greatest odds.
We go out that evening to a Mexican bar we’ve come across that does excellent cocktails. We call the family and all the close friends to tell them the news and many mojitos later we dance down the street to the hotel, chanting as we go: He’s-brea-thing-on-his-own! He’s-brea-thing-on-his-own!
***
Our euphoria is short-lived. The days sink back into their routine; each morning I wake in the hotel room with a stab of fear. I remember what it felt like to wake slowly and easily but now I am taut with foreboding at what the day might hold. I get up and fill the small hotel kettle to make tea for whoever is with me, either Ron or one of the children if Ron’s not there.
Marina is with me today. She has just turned twenty, the youngest in the family and Miles’s adored little sister. Looking at her small shape still asleep in the bed I am relieved to see her face peaceful for the moment. I switch on the kettle and sit down to wait for it to boil, leaning back in the armchair with my eyes closed. Miles is lying in a hospital bed just a few streets away from us; despite breathing on his own he is still in a coma. In the quiet of these cold mornings I have a new ritual: I go to him. I’ve never been able to meditate but this thing I can do, willing my mind to cut loose so that I can join him where he is. There is a list I repeat like a mantra when I reach him: please let him open his eyes and know us, please let him walk again, talk again, please, please let his brain heal so that he can come back and be the vital person he was. I want to use the concentrated force of furious love to make these things happen. I suppose this is the way that some people find prayer helpful; perhaps this is a prayer.
I wake Marina with a cup of tea and call Claudia, who is in the next door room, to join us before we go down to breakfast.
Breakfast has become an ordeal. I used to love hotel breakfasts like a childish treat, the anticipation of what new and exotic choice might be on offer in a foreign dining room, but now I find I can’t eat anything. Walking into this Alpine dining room each morning I am repulsed at the sight of the serving tables set out with what seems a lavishly obscene spread of food: great bowls of gelatinous yogurt, muesli glistening with nuts and seeds, glass jars of dark sticky honey and blood-colored jams, fresh red raspberry, strawberry, dark blue fruits of the forest. There are platters of fat yellow cheeses or oozing creamy ones, slices of violent pink ham and salami, bowls of bald expressionless eggs and baskets piled high with voluptuous rolls. Around these tables the hotel guests circle intently, eyeing the food and jostling for position to load their plates, and I can only think of snouts and troughs. I find a table in the corner and sit down, and around me I’m aware of munching and swilling, a lifting of spoons and forks and cups to mouths that seem to open and close and chomp in a syncopated rhythm of mastication, all in time to the sickening jingle of hotel muzak playing on a loop in the background; it’s like being in an orchestrated farmyard. I am trapped in a nightmare that has continued into the morning, a ludicrous object of grief crouched in the corner, pinched and thin and angry, hollow-eyed and foul.
It is a new thing, this anger, and it is taking unattractive and unexpected forms. It is mostly scattergun, undirected—above all I could machine-gun the moon and stars, but I also want to pepper with bullets anybody or anything that comes in the way of my private grief or, and especially, that may be a threat to Miles. For example, the nurse who seemed careless when taking his obs yesterday or the arrogant young doctor who told me that snowboarding with a crash helmet causes more damage than doing it without one. Incomprehension is generating the anger I feel, we all feel—it is impossible to make sense of what has happened to Miles and our ignorance fuels resentment.
When the girls have eaten and I have drunk my coffee we escape upstairs to the privacy